Something strange happened at the Cafe de Flore

By Gaither Stewart

Photo: Something strange happened at the Cafe de Flore

Something strange happened at the Cafe de Flore

(Paris) It is counterproductive to attempt to debunk Parisian cafes and cafe culture. Whether revisionists and debunkers approve or not, the Cafe de Flore on Paris’ Boulevard Saint Germain is a living institution. Since it was founded in 1870 it has existed as a café and second home for writers, artists and intellectuals of the likes of Apollinaire, Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The Flore was frequented by Hemingway and even Truman Capote. In the 1920s and 30s, it was the meeting place of the Right, after World War II of the Left. Forming a triangle with the famous but touristy Deux Magots (today “out” and taboo for the Parisian intelligentsia) and the Brasserie Lipp just across the street, the Flore has always been linked with Paris, culture and political ideas.

Certain cityscapes palpitate with the violent ideas that have made cities like Paris great. It is impossible to pass the Café de Flore without pausing a moment to imagine Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre ensconced at a back table in that left-bank citadel of thought on a rainy November day, discussing the rage and the alienation and the revolt and the urge for revolution of their age.

In their works those existentialist intellectuals wrote the biography of European rebellion born with the French Revolution. Much of their thought was born in the Flore.

Now we too might pause to wonder who is going to write where the history of the great modern American Revolution in the making. When will it begin, we wonder now? Or has it already begun somewhere in the guts of America? We can’t help but wonder.

Right there in the Café de Flore, Sartre and Camus re-hashed again and again the idea of the metaphysical rebellion born in the western world after 1789. I like to imagine they evaluated also the year of 1848 a century earlier, the year Michael Bakunin and Friedrich Engels witnessed the second wave of revolution sweep across Europe, from Paris to Berlin and Vienna.

Sitting on the terrasse of the Flore today you can evoke images of Paris 1968 here on this boulevard where many of the scenes passed, an explosion only vaguely imagined by Sartre and Camus. The year that briefly changed the world began here—until the tide of reaction rebounded, sweeping the eternal bourgeoisie back into place.

I also recall Camus’ conditioning in his books and notes every Sartrean provocation with his own conviction of the Greek idea of limits. And I wonder!

THE MASKS

Social-political masks are the threat. Yesterday as today. In peace or war. In Fascism or the revolution of workingmen. The bourgeoisie’s support for liberals will always be a great mystification to confuse the revolutionary. And it is the reason for our mistrust of bien-pensant liberals. The more liberals turn to the Right, the happier the bourgeoisie and the greater its support for “liberal” causes. And therefore the marriage of (bourgeois) liberal democracy and market capitalism.

The gap between the people and what we call bourgeois capitalism is by definition unbridgeable. Meek protest does not count a whit. Though the ultimate tremendous effect on the American people of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is unimaginable, popular protest still goes unheeded. It is really quite simple: Superpowers should never be confused with democracies.

REBELLION OR REVOLUTION? WHICH WILL IT BE?

Therefore I wanted to write about the difference between rebellion and revolution. A kind of either/or. Yet, they form a chain. In ascendance. For there is no revolution without rebellion, without saying “no!” to what was before.

Where are we today in America? In Europe? The basic, the fundamental point, the point of departure, must always be consciousness. The consciousness, the awareness of one’s situation and one’s consequent rejection of it. Refusal to continue along the same old paths, refusal to accept it any longer. Awareness can lead first to rebellion, and from there it might lead to revolution. Might, because the three steps are not automatic and consequential.

And in America? Unfortunately social awareness is yet to be born there in a concrete form. But it is in gestation. That growing awareness is the threat to power. One can imagine its bursting forth. To be followed then by contagious rebellion. Then, and only then, the American Left believes, can the revolution begin. Not a spontaneous revolt. But a planned overturn of everything that was and is today. Change, one can believe in.

Meanwhile we have to deal with the first step. With awareness. Without awareness of America’s real condition every act of rebellion is gratuitous and infantile. Stamping one’s foot and saying “no” just to be ornery. Essential is the awareness of the reasons for rebellion.

That is where, I fear, 99% of Americans and Europeans stand today: dissatisfied but enmeshed in a cloud of unawareness of our real situation. Afraid to look into a mirror and see ourselves and where we are.

LIMITS

I try to imagine them today, the post-World War II intellectuals, in the Café de Flore, arguing, discussing, plotting, distinguishing. But these we know are other times. These are new and complex times. Idoubt they are discussing revolution in the Parisian cafés today. Perhaps un petit peu of rebellion. Un petit peu of protest. Accusations against reactionary President Nicolas Sarkozy, today also at the helm of the European Union. Maybe they lament the disillusionment and the evaporation of the French Left. Staring into the Café de Flore from the street I imagine the disappointment of the French Left—Socialists, liberals and rebels—in both the program and the showing of the Socialist Party.

But revolution? Non, merci! Though the French voted against the European Draft Constitution in protest, there are precious few signs of revolt against multinational Europe governed by its great banks and presided over by their man Sarkozy today. We are more mature than that, they claim.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN REBELLION AND REVOLUTION

In his book The Rebel Camus deals with the Greek emphasis on “limits.” Even revolt (rebellion) has limits. In Camus’ vision “bad revolution” knows no set limits. Au contraire, so as not to degenerate into terror, the “good” revolution relies on the true sources of rebellion. Though I resist this thought, I accept that the “good revolution” must draw its inspiration from a system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits in the first place.

Marx and Engels and Lenin spoke at length about this tricky topic. But you can refresh some of your insights with the sacred sources, so to speak. The classical distinction is that made between a non-Marxian, spontaneous “insurrection” or "rebellion" or "uprising" and a formal revolution according to communist precepts.

Of former spontaneous insurrections, the classical case is the Spartacist revolt in Germany, whose program was ill-conceived and soon met with defeat. The justicialist peasant revolts throughout the middle ages, which Luther denounced, shared that semi-anarchic aspect, even though at times they were led by charismatic figures (Spartacus himself being one).

One might say as I do: My heart is with spontaneous revolution, my reason is for eternal rebellion morphing into revolution.

This however is a false contraposition. Eternal rebellion is bound to morph into revolution, which perforce becomes "permanent revolution" or "constant revolution". Lenin, Mao and even Fidel suggested "constant revolution" or, more precisely, "constant cultural-political revolution," as the cure for the gradual corruption of each revolutionary project. Under conditions of "eternal revolution" (which the bourgeois caricature as constant chaos) the masses do not withdraw from the direct exercise of power as easily happens. They don’t sit back and become spectators of history, leaving all power in the hands of representatives who, with the passing of time, become a new privileged stratum, not a CLASS, as many claim!. (Milovan Djilas, The New Class)

Rebelliousness without a real cause is a juvenile or neurotic disorder. A waste of human potential.

BRUSSELS

The European Union today resembles the bourgeois restoration following the rebellion that spread across the world after 1968. On the eve of the G20 in Washington last November 15 President Sarkozy in his role as rotating President of the EU assured his political model George Bush that the situation in Europe was under control. Aggressivity and rigidity were things of the past. The 27 European nations now had a common position. No more divisions. Europe now spoke with one voice. A reactionary voice. For reaction is sweeping across Europe from Paris to Budapest, from Berlin to Rome. The concept of a new unity in Europe, a unity based on reaction, was then confirmed in Washington by the President of the European Comission, arch-consrvative José Manuel Barroso.

Sarkozy and Barroso were pronouncing their nuanced message loud and clear: the era of only one currency and one direction ended with the failure of Lehman Brothers on September 11, a piloted crash without even consulting Europe. Those who paid the consequences of the crisis have the right to be heard, Europe cried … and quickly.

This reactionary Europe is in revolt against its brothers in the United States. This capitalist, reactionary Europe, though wounded by American hegemony of the past, now wants to be heard. But it is NOT in disagreement with American capitalism. It just wants more of it … and it wants a bigger piece of the cake.

Nicolas Sarkozy is the symbol of this “revolt of Europe to the Right.” Photos today depict Sarkozy and his new wife, the Italian fashion model and now French chanteuse, Carla Bruni, jogging on New York’s East Side, along the Fifth Avenue wall of Central Park. The French President loves American life style. He loves more the power of the US President, which has had a boomerang effect among the people in France: the more he visits Texas ranches and takes off his tie to seem more American, the farther he drifts from formal French style, and the more his popularity slips.

Yet Sarkozy himself is realizing his own dream: the French Presidency. He built his entire previous existence around that goal. He used every trick to arrive. Now he has it, and the great power that comes with it. A leftwing exile from Montreal morphed into a Parisien rebel down on his house boat parked near the Concorde Bridge across from the Chamber of Deputies says Sarkozy has the “boulevard” (he means the avenue of power) open before him. He can do anything he desires. My Paris neighbor, Jean-Michel, who places himself in the political center, echoes him, and labels Sarkozy “totalitarian.” But a gracious bourgois lady at a dinner party a few nights ago instead just “loves Sarkozy” and defines herself proudly a “Gauliist.” She doesn’t realize that Sarkozy in his rush to power crushed also Gauliism, perhaps forever.

Meanwhile, I went back to now the fashionable Café de Flore. Certainly the typical customers are no longer the intellectuals. Out on the veranda sit the tourists looking for celebrities. Also on the terrasse or at the window tables inside are the chic graduates of Paris’ elite schools like the ENA (Ecole National d’Administration) or the ESSEC business school, all dressed in their uniform body-hugging black clothes and short black topcoats and fashionable stiletto pointed shoes. (For some innate and phobic reason I can never trust a man in shoes with pointed toes!) These elite school graduates today demand more lenient laws on firing and hiring. They evoke the American or British systems. “Fired today, a new job tomorrow” is their motto.

Gaither Stewart, Senior Contributing Editor for Cyrano's Journal/tantmieux, is a novelist and journalist based in Italy, now on a three-month stay in Paris. His stories, essays and dispatches are read widely throughout the Internet on many leading venues. His recent novel, Asheville, is published by Wastelandrunes, (www.wastelandrunes.com).